Voting is not rational (usually.)

araneae

Today is the midterm elections in the United States, and I am not voting.

For the vast majority of elections, voting is irrational, because the individual's vote is proportionately very small. This means it cannot have an effect on the outcome.

There are, however, conditions which can lead to voting becoming rational, and these are:

The number of voters approaches zero.
The ratio of votes for candidates (in a majority wins, 2 person race) approaches .5
The difficulty of voting becomes vanishingly small.
Incentives are created to make the costs of not voting greater than the cost of voting (for instance, not voting is illegal in Australia, and incurs a fine.)

For me, as for nearly everyone, voting this year is irrational. 1 and 2 are nowhere close to true, and 3 is especially bad for me this year. I forgot to change my address on my voter's registration until yesterday and my polling location is both a) usually overpopulated and filled with long lines and b) farther than I care to go.

Only 3 and 4 are something that we can certainly do something about. The web-based absentee voter system that was tested this fall is a step in that directions, but its subsequent hacking was unsurprising. Is opening our system up to fraud a reasonable trade-off to get more people to vote? Should there be an option to use paper absentee-like ballots even if you are not absent? Should the U.S. go the Australia route?

Today is the midterm elections in the United States, and I am not voting.

For the vast majority of elections, voting is irrational, because the individual's vote is proportionately very small. This means it cannot have an effect on the outcome.

There are, however, conditions which can lead to voting becoming rational, and these are:

The number of voters approaches zero.
The ratio of votes for candidates (in a majority wins, 2 person race) approaches .5
The difficulty of voting becomes vanishingly small.
Incentives are created to make the costs of not voting greater than the cost of voting (for instance, not voting is illegal in Australia, and incurs a fine.)

Wow, guys. I would have expected more of the less wrong crowd.

You emotionally dislike the fact that voting is irrational, so you've downvoted this post, but you haven't even attempted to reason with me.

If I'm wrong, tell me why. Don't just have an emotional reaction.

You emotionally dislike the fact that voting is irrational, so you've downvoted this post, but you haven't even attempted to reason with me.

If this post is getting downvoted, it's probably because it shows a lack of awareness of a zillion previous discussions on voting, e.g. this one. Many LWers like the decision theory called Timeless Decision Theory, in which - if I understand it correctly, a dubious assumption - you consider yourself to be making a decision not just for yourself, but for all similar minds. One advantage of this is that TDT agents coo... (read more)

4Servant16y

The reason may be less that the LW community believes voting is rational...but that the LW community already understands that voting IS irrational, and the LW community is just reacting negatively to having the same idea be brought up again. I understand you provided some solutions to try and make voting 'rational', though, however, I do disagree with the idea that #3 and #4 would actually work. Voting only becomes rational when your vote does sways an issue, and not only is this chance incredibly small, but it would likely provoke an automatic recount, meaning your vote is again proven useless. Providing one extra vote to your side when your side is already is winning/losing is inherently irrational (at least in terms of swaying policy, not signaling views).